Resistance to occupation uniting factions
HAROON SIDDIQUI
Apr. 20, 2003. 01:00 AM Toronto Star
"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators."
That's not George W. Bush but Lt.-Gen. Stanley Maude addressing Iraqis after the British occupation of Baghdad in 1917. With the Ottoman empire's surrender a year later, the British proclaimed the three Mesopotamian provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul as Iraq.
Running into resistance, they set aside Maude's assurances, reached for gas shells and opted for the "wholesale slaughter" of Arab tribes, in the phrase of another British officer.
They quelled the uprising, at the cost of 10,000 Iraqi and 450 British dead, and an expenditure of the then-staggering sum of £40 million.
They also installed their own man, Amir Faisal. The son of the sheriff of Mecca and leader of the Arab Revolt, he was imported from his European exile following his overthrow in Syria by the French.
The British even stage-managed a "referendum" to crown him king — to the strains of "God Save The King."
The British spent the next decade battling the autonomy-seeking, oil-rich Kurds. The job was accomplished by merciless air bombing, with colonial secretary Winston Churchill even urging the use of mustard gas.
This bit of history provides disturbing parallels to current events: the American invasion of Iraq; the raising of the American flag, albeit temporarily, at Umm Qasr and on a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad; and the American machinations over who should rule Iraq.
A more recent parallel is also relevant. After the justified American war on terrorism in Afghanistan, it was the United Nations that organized the conclaves of Afghans that picked Hamid Karzai as president, bestowing on him legitimacy.
In Iraq, the show is all American. While Bush and retired Lt.-Gen. Jay Garner, head of the planned interim American administration, are saying all the right things — the president promising "a government of, by and for the Iraqi people" — the Americans do have their Prince Faisal in tow.
They have flown Ahmed Chalabi back to Iraq, which he left as a child in 1956. But they are shunning the Shiite majority, especially the groups with the largest following.
Popular resistance has already begun. In Basra, Najaf and Karbala, as well as in parts of Baghdad, anti-American marches are accompanied by declarations of self-governance.
In Mosul, which is half Kurd and half Sunni Arab, U.S. soldiers have killed 10 of the latter in a mini-uprising.
Commentators are raising the spectre of civil war — the Lebanonization of Iraq — given its religious and ethnic divisions.
But while the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Chaldean Christians (former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz) and Marsh Arabs have at times been at each others' throats, their real battles have always been with unrepresentative and often oppressive central governments — and with foreign occupiers.
Now, they are more likely to turn against the Anglo-American forces than on each other.
The Shiite majority — 60 per cent of Iraq's 23 million people — is concentrated in the south and in the teeming Baghdad suburb of Sadr (formerly Saddam) City.
They have been victimized many times over. Frozen out of power by the minority Sunnis who have ruled ever since Prince Faisal, they were targeted by Saddam. He killed 20,000 of them, including 250 of their revered clerics.
They see the promised dawn of democracy as their chance at majority rule.
The group that claims the largest following among them is led by Syed Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, who has been in exile in Iran since 1984.
He opposes the interim American administration, preferring it to be Iraqi, and he boycotted Garner's first enclave of potential leaders.
Another quasi-religious group boycotting the process is Al-Dawa. It is alleged to have committed terrorist acts against the Saddam regime as well as against Americans in Lebanon.
A third force is the Howza, Shiite centres of learning and spirituality. The one with the largest following is led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Najaf.
Americans are wary of turban-wearing politicians, especially those with links to Islamic Iran.
But not all Iraqi Shiites take their cue from Iran, religiously or politically. Iraqi Shiites fought with Iraqi Sunnis in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Among non-Shiites, the most persecuted are the Kurds, at between 4 million and 5 million.
Saddam killed about 180,000 of them, including 5,000 in a chemical attack. But they have had their best period since the 1991 Gulf War, thanks to the American-enforced no-fly zone.
They are divided between two legendary leaders, each controlling his own turf. But Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani co-operated in teaming up their militias with American troops on two missions: moving west into Saddam's oil fields and east to eliminate Al-Ansar guerrillas.
The latter, followers of Osama bin Laden, held a sliver of land along the Iran border.
The Kurds have given up on independence and pledged to work within a pluralistic Iraq. They have earned the right to a Quebec-like autonomy in a federal, democratic Iraq.
The Sunnis are scattered. London-based Monarchy Movement is led by Sharif Ali bin al-Hussaini, 45, a descendant of Faisal. He has little support.
Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, led by a Shiite, Iyad Alawi, includes Sunni former military officers and civil servants.
Another distinct group, the Marsh Arabs, have little clout.
Theirs is a 6,000-year-old culture. But reacting to their 1991 revolt, Saddam drained their swamp at the mouth of the Gulf, burned the reed beds and poisoned the lagoons. About 100,000 Marsh Arabs moved to cities, 40,000 escaped to Iran and an unknown number were killed. It was Stalinesque ethnic cleansing and a catastrophic environmental disaster.
Iraqi religious and ethnic groups need to work out their differences at the ballot box. That is also the best guarantee of moving the militants among them away from violence.
This rare opportunity is an unarguable benefit of the American invasion. It will be lost by any American attempt at creating a client state.
Far more ominously, it may replicate the mistakes of the British and the French whose agenda for the Middle East, as laid down between 1915 and 1922, turned out to be durable and disastrous.
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